The Fatal Contract

Title page of the first edition of The Fatal Contract (1653)

The Fatal Contract: A French Tragedy is a Caroline era stage play, written by William Heminges.[1][2] The play has been regarded as one of the most extreme of the revenge tragedies or "tragedies of blood," like The Spanish Tragedy and Titus Andronicus, that constitute a distinctive subgenre of English Renaissance theatre. In this "most graphic Caroline revenge tragedy...Heminges tops his predecessors' grotesque art by creating a female character, Chrotilda, who disguises herself as a black Moorish eunuch" and "instigates most of the play's murder and mayhem."[3]

  1. ^ Carol A. Morley, ed., The Plays and Poems of William Heminge, Madison, NJ, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006.
  2. ^ William Heminges, The Fatal Contract, Anne Elizabeth Chard Hargrove, ed., Kalamazoo, MI, Medieval Institute Publications, University of Michigan Press, 1978.
  3. ^ Virginia Mason, Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500–1800, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005; pp. 121–2.